Disconnecting Ukraine from Europe
During the election campaign, Donald Trump claimed that he could stop the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, and that was before he took office as president on January 20 2025. As we all know, it did not happen. Nevertheless, it seems as if his phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin came as a surprise to those around him, both in NATO, in the EU and EUs surroundings.
The negotiating card has now been played, but the solution is not clear. Various considerations are clashing; not unexpectedly becauuse real and deep contradictions have been covered over. This mean having to reshuffle the deck of cards and agree on their order. The order of the factors is not indifferent. The first step should be to achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine in order to clear the ground for negotiations on a new European security order. Such a framework could be used for further negotiations on Ukraine and Russia.
See who’s talking
US President Donald Trump has spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin for an hour and a half and the conversation is said to have been both ways, according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitrij Peskov, although that in itself sounds a bit incredible. On the other hand, the “newly graduated” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has come with some clear messages. At the NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, he layed the realities on the table the way the Trump administration sees it:
It is “unrealistic” that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and it is just as “unrealistic” to believe that Ukraine will get back all the territory that they have had since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, i.e. before 2014.
This is hardly surprising, given that Trump won the election on November 9th 2024 and given the real military situation on the ground in Ukraine as it has gradually developed over the past year. Still it seems that Europe is still surprised and panicking. During the first 24 hours the reactions went in all directions. They were largely characterized by a real fear in Europe, including in Ukraine, that Trump envisions himself solving the problems alone with Putin.
Trump has fueled that fear to a great extent through a series of foreign policy moves, ranging from the US taking over Gaza after the strip of land on the Mediterranean has been emptied of Palestinians, to threatening to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland, by military force if necessary, to recommending Canada to become the 51st state of the United States. (The latter must disappoint his Puerto Rican supporters who are genuinely in favor of making the Caribbean island a US state, including Governor Jenniffer González-Colón of the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP). She was elected on November 5th with 41.22 percent after swallowing all the hate against Puerto Rico that the Trump camp spewed out during the election campaign.)
Quo vadis, Europe?
The speculation about Trump and Putin going it alone was quickly corrected, to some extent, by the White House: Trump has spoken with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj, and Kyiv will have a voice in the negotiations. To the extent that this was suitable to calm the unrest, the other, fear-filled reaction is still in place. It is formulated as follows by The Guardian: “No lasting peace in Ukraine without a European role in the talks”.
– European powers, including Britain, France, and Germany, have insisted that they must be involved in any future negotiations regarding Ukraine’s future. They emphasized that a fair agreement, with security guarantees, is essential for ensuring lasting peace, according to a centrist British newspaper. “Our common goal must be to position Ukraine for strength. Ukraine and Europe should be included in all negotiations,” stated seven European countries and the European Commission, echoing the argument made by EU foreign ministers at their meeting in Paris on Wednesday.
Together behind the statement are Europe’s great power political trio on the western side, Germany, France and Britain. (They formed the so-called EU-3 during the negotiations on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement on Iran on July 14, 2015 together with the USA and Russia. The other countries behind the statement are Spain, Italy, Poland – and Ukraine.)
– Ukraine should be given strong security guarantees. A just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary prerequisite for a strong transatlantic security, the joint statement states, inviting for cooperation with the USA.
– There will be no just and lasting peace in Ukraine without the participation of Europeans, says French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot. No decision “without Ukraine”, stated Germany’s Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who has emerged as a hawk on security policy issues.
– We want peace for Ukraine, but we want an unjust war to end with a just peace,” added Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares Bueno from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE).
Background: Back to February 2014
Not unexpectedly, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Tomasz (Radek) Sikorski stressed that “there is no better guarantee for the security of our continent than close transatlantic cooperation.” Sikorski was Foreign Minister the last time that Donald Tusk was Prime Minister of Poland. He has been heavily involved in the situation in Ukraine with his anti-Russian perspective, which he cultivates well together with his wife, the American neoconservative journalist and historian Anne Applebaum. Sikorski was one of three EU foreign ministers who were present as guarantors, along with Russia’s representative, when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych signed the agreement with Ukraine’s three leading opposition politicians concerning an interim government and new elections in Ukraine. This was February 21, 2014, the same day that the Verkhovna Rada, the national parliament, unanimously decided to reinstate the 2004 constitution.
However, the agreement did not survive the evening. It was torn apart by Dmytro Yarosh, leader of the neo-Nazi Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor) when the three opposition leaders presented the agreement
on Maidan Square. Right Sector had taken over the so-called Euromaidan protests in central Kyiv after carrying out their violent riots on Hrushevskoho Street in January.
After tearing up the agreement, armed Right Sector members seized the parliament and other public buildings and started a manhunt for the fleeing president and former prime minister Mykola (Nikolay) Yanovich Azarov of the Party of Regions (Ukrainian: Partiia rehioniv; Russian: Partiya regionov). The next day, the coup d’état in Kyiv was completed by a National Assembly surrounded by armed men.
This fundamentally changed Ukraine’s political future and its relations with Russia. The kleptocrat Yanukovych was not a popular man at that time, neither in eastern Ukraine nor in the rapidly disintegrating Party of Regions. But the fundamental contradictions between east and west and south in Ukraine that had characterized every election since independence in 1991 were by no means resolved; there was no “Euromaidan” in Donbas, in the Donetsk or Luhansk oblasts (counties/regions).
The decisive factor of the upheaval in Ukraine on February 22, 2014, was that Kyiv renounced the possibility of balancing between east and west, between Moscow and Brussels and Washington, given the country’s ancient and recent history. Think for example about the EU-enthusiastic Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko who negotiated with Putin on gas and transit contracts with Gazprom. Then think about President Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected the association agreement with the EU because he received a more lucrative offer from the Kremlin and who had extended the base agreement for the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol in Crimea until 2047, but who did not join Putin’s prestigious project; the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and who instead joined the customs union with Russia because, according to Brussels, joining EAEU would not be compatible with EU agreements.
The first thing the National Assembly did after ousting Yanukovych was to remove Russian as an official language. Although the ban was lifted, it sent disturbing signals to the east and south about the direction Ukraine was heading.
Kremlin demands, December 2021
Today, we are, in reality, back to square one, to December 2021 – except that there are three years of bloody war in Ukraine following Russia’s “full-scale war” in violation of international law between then and today. After a year of increased tension following the summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden on June 6 in Geneva, the Kremlin presented ten points on security guarantees on December 15 2021.
The points were an invitation to the US and NATO to start the much-needed discussion on a new European security order, something that should have been done quite immediately after the Soviet Union dissolved and the Warsaw Pact dug its own grave after the Cold War.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had been given new tasks, but was still sidelined in connection with the wars of disintegration in Yugoslavia (1991-99). The wars led, as is well known, to the first extensive war in Europe, which ended with NATO’s bombing of Serbia (Former Yugoslavia) over the conflict in Kosovo.
Russia’s overtures, against the backdrop of the gradual escalation of the armed conflict in Donbas throughout 2020-21 and increasingly closer ties between Kyiv, Washington and Brussels (NATO/EU), were immediately rejected.
They were dead on arrival because NATO labeled several of the Kremlin’s demands as ultimatums. This was not least the case when it came to NATO’s expansion, including Ukraine and Georgia. NATO had opened the door to this at the Bucharest summit in 1998.
The rejection was more categorical by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg than by President Biden, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The NATO-Russia Council met for the last time at NATO headquarters in Brussels on 12. January 2022, to discuss the Russian buildup of forces in Russia and Belarus. The respective delegations were led by US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Jens Stoltenberg and by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko and Deputy Minister of Defense Colonel General Aleksandr Fomin.
After the meeting, only 43 days before Russia’s invasion, Stoltenberg declared that NATO’s goal was to make Ukraine a member state, and on January 25th, NATO’s official rejection of Kremlin’s main demand, which NATO believed was in conflict with “the right of countries to choose their own security.”
In other words, the same false argument that NATO has used to defend its expansion eastward and into the Balkans: The new member states themselves have wanted to become members and Russia has no veto power.
NATO’s false arguments
No one who has followed Sweden and Finland’s struggle to become members can doubt that there is one, and only one, condition that applies: The question of membership lies exclusively with NATO – and membership requires consensus among Nato’s members. It is therefore entirely NATO’s own responsibility when it comes to a mutual European security arrangement, since NATO did not lay down its arms when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved on 1 July 1991. Instead, NATO extended its arms into the Eurasian corridor that had opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union, from the Baltic Sea across the Black Sea and Central Asia to Xinjiang on China’s western border (cf. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”, New York, 1997, Basic Books).
The US and NATO ignored the warnings from the Cold War foreign policy guru, George F. Kennan (1904-2005). Kennan was the architect of containment, the policy of encircling Soviet expansion. He warned New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman about the danger of a new Cold War when Congress opened the door to expanding NATO eastward in 1998.
Thereafter the US and NATO buried the warnings that the then US ambassador to Russia (2005-08), William Burns made, when NATO, to satisfy President George W. Bush, decided to open up to future NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Although this was opposed by France (under President Nicolas Sarkozy) and Germany (under Chancellor Angela Merkel), but with the support of Norway.
The memo from Burns, CIA director until January 23 2025, was precisely the prescription that Burns wrote out on the march towards the coming war, step by step: In 2008, Burns wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the clearest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian actors, from the knuckle-draggers in the Kremlin’s dark recesses to Putin’s sharpest views on Ukraine, I have yet to find anyone who sees Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Many have drawn comparisons between the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the bilateral presence of the United States and other NATO countries in Ukraine, which is precisely what is meant by “borderland” for historical reasons.
NATO has become intoxicated through its own expansion. The first expansion in 1999 came at the same time that NATO, at its Washington summit, wrote into its statutes the right to conduct military operations—out-of-area and without a UN mandate—and then immediately exercised this self-imposed “right” against Serbia.
Russia was at that time so weak that the US and NATO could look away from the need for a European security system, because NATO projected itself as the “security system” for all of Europe, like a haughty Louis XIV. “L’Europe, c’est moi” (“L’État c’est moi”, the state is me).
This was at a time when the US and other major NATO powers completely overran Russia (and the veto country China and ordinary UN members who have always risked being exposed to threats of US punitive action) in the UN Security Council. For example when the weapons inspectors’ report on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was presented to the Security Council on December 1998. During the meeting, the British ambassador asked for a break in the negotiations. When the meeting was reconvened, he announced that the US and Britain have begun bombing targets in Iraq, which lasted from December 16 to 19.
NATO’s track to the abyss
This week’s meeting in Paris was intended as a precursor to the annual Munich Security Conference this weekend and the first meeting with the Trump administration. However, it was disrupted by controversial Defense Minister Hegseth, whose blunt statements at the meeting with Ukraine’s international supporters in Brussels on Wednesday, stole the spotlight. His remarks interrupted discussions on NATO’s strategy to strengthen Ukraine and the increasingly intrusive planning for future peace talks.
– Chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering, Hegseth said about NATO’s line of equipping Ukraine to restore Ukraine’s borders from before 2014. Hegseth also rules out NATO membership for Ukraine, but that peace would instead have to be secured by “capable European and non-European troops” – but not troops from the United States.
Previously, French President Emmanuel Macron – together with the belligerent Danish former NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen – has been the most vocal in promoting the idea of deploying forces in Ukraine. Any troops deployed in Ukraine would not be part of a NATO mission, Hegseth stated, and they will also not be covered by NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, i.e. the so-called “musketeer” clause on mutual obligations to intervene in the event of an attack on a NATO member based on the principle of “one for all, all for one”.
At the Munich Security Conference, US Vice President J. D. (James David) Vance read the text to Europe in such a directly condescending manner that German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius asked from the rostrum at the Bayerischer Hof on Promenadenplatz whether EU and the US any longer share common values.
Earlier this week, President Zelenskyj clarified to The Guardian that Europe alone is not able to offer resilient security guarantees to Kyiv without US involvement. “Security guarantees without America are not real,” he stated.
A multinational deterrent force deployed in Ukraine in connection with a ceasefire must be between 100,000 and 150,000 troops, Zelensky believes. Even though this would be far less than the at least 600,000 Russian troops now in occupied Ukraine.
“Europe cannot provide a force like this right now. But we cannot force the US, so we have to accept this and figure out what we can do,” a senior European diplomat told the British newspaper.
Rough-hewn “realism”
In a brutal way, the US’s rough-hewn “realism” that can be syncopated in the mantra “Make America First Great Again” has hit NATO amidships. The loud tribute to the alleged unity and strength behind the gathering of NATO and the EU during the Ukraine war has been like a camouflage net over repressed contradictions. They have gone in several directions; compare the Polish and Baltic states’ outburst against Germany for withholding the “export license” which hindered providing German-made Leopold 2 tanks and long-range missiles to Ukraine, and compare the popular opposition to the war in several NATO countries, of which Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Croatian President Zoran Milanović have been the foremost proponents.
The confusion over what Europe-NATO, including Canada, and the EU should do remains after the Munich conference. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte from the Dutch right-liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Demokratie (VVD) wants to raise military spending in member states from the mandated target of two percent of gross domestic product to five percent of GDP.
This is so completely taken out of thin air that one can suspect the former Dutch Prime Minister of turning a blind eye to the tariffs and the possible trade war with the US and the ripple effects it and other trade wars that Trump is starting will have on the global economy. Neither does Rutte seem to read the growing public opinion in more and more European countries.
Almost everything is revolving around the standard threat that is now being served from all sides; that Russia poses a military threat to the rest of Europe if Ukraine does not “win” the war. This is echoed in the recent report from the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DE), which warns of a possible military conflict between Russia and Europe within five years.
This conclusion is highlighted, while the premises and conditions for the constructed scenario are overshadowed by the block-letter headlines.
https://www.gamereactor.no/forsvarets-efterretningstjeneste-advarer-mot-en-mulig-militaer-konflikt-mellom-russland-og-europa-innen-fem-ar-1695733/
In Norway, the warmongering leader of the Liberal Party, Guri Melby, has been at the forefront of getting a unanimous Parliament (Stortinget) to ramp up the Nansen program. The program was originally 15 billion krone a year over five years, from 2023 to 2027, but was last year extended until the end of 2030 with a total framework for military and civilian support of 135 billion krone. A pillar in the justification for the extension is that unless “Ukraine wins/Russia loses,” the whole of Europe will be layed bare to Russia.
The reality is that for almost three years, Russia has spent enormous resources and a terrifying number of soldiers (although the numbers vary wildly and are not verified) in an attempt to gain military control over four oblasts: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, all the land east of the
Dnieper – and today has conquered no more than 18 percent of Ukraine after failing in the campaign to capture Kyiv from February 24, 2022.
Negotiations bogged down
The situation demands that the negotiation track be stepped up in a realistic and truthful manner. This requires that two related issues be kept separate: The most important issue is a much-needed European security system. There are 13,642 kilometers “from Lisbon to Vladivostok”, which the last Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev brought up after the Cold War – or from Cape Finisterre (Cabo Finisterre), the cape in the province of La Coruña in Galicia on Spain’s northwest coast, to the Ural Mountains in Russia and to the Caucasus with Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Now it is also necessary to incorporate the Arctic and the high north areas including the Northeast Passage (Russian: Severniy morskoy put) between Europe and and Asia which is becoming ice-free for increasingly longer periods of the year.
Part of this are Ukraine’s security guarantees, without membership in NATO, which will be the transition to the second negotiation issue: Ukraine’s independence, which includes both internal affairs and relations with Russia. This requires, as a first step,negotiating a ceasefire.
The negotiations cannot and must not be left to Russia and Ukraine alone – nor to the pair Trump and Putin. The order is not coincidental either. The negotiations on a European security arrangement require an anchoring in the UN and within a framework for a revived Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Of course, the negotiations on Ukraine cannot take place without Kyiv, and must include Europe and the OSCE. During the preparation of the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements (signed on September 5, 2014 and February 12, 2015), German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande participated.
(Both have admitted that they never attempted to fulfill the agreements, but were only looking to but time for the Ukrainian President and the chocolate oligarch Petro Poroshenko. Zelenskyj has, in turn, more than hinted that he would have been assassinated if he had advocated implementing the Minsk agreement, on which Zelenskyj was elected president in connection with the second round of the election on April 21, 2019, with no less than 73 percent against Poroshenko’s 25 percent.)
The three therefore exclusively pushed forward the demand that Russia must first of all withdraw its forces before anything else could be discussed. This was a deliberate blind alley that followed the same direction as the Rambouillet negotiations on Kosovo under the leadership of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (January 1997 to January 2001), one of the architects of “global NATO”. The blind alley negotiations led to the 79 day (March 24 – June 10, 1999) bombing of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) during NATO’s first “out of area” war.
The left-wing blind alley
The opposition to the war in Norway and the demand for a new European security system died in the Parliament (Storting) with the Red Party’s resolution at its National Congress in Stavanger on April 23, 2023. A political collapse for its foreign policy and its anti-imperialist analysis giving a victory to the “comrades in arms”.
Red deliberately concealed that the arms aid was NATO-coordinated from the US Army Base in Wiesbaden in the German state of Hessen. That was until Brussels broke with its usual practice (as during the bombing of Libya in 2011) and made the coordination of arms aid official NATO policy.
The resolution from the National Congress: “Today, the arms donations are made directly by Norway or in cooperation with other countries, not by NATO. This must continue, in order to support the Ukrainians’ defensive struggle without further increasing the danger of a great-power war.”
The National Congress’s resolution is based solely on the outbreak of the war, without taking Ukraine’s history and political development during its independence from 1991 into consideration, including the coup d’état in Kyiv on February 22, 2014 and the popular resistance against the coup in Donbas and Crimea, and the rehabilitation of the fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a national hero.
https://roedt.no/ukraina (The War in Ukraine) and
https://roedt.no/rodt-stotter-ukrainas-kamp-for-frihet-landsmote23
As the war has gone its course, NATO’s dogma has been to arm Ukraine to strengthen its negotiating position, including the possibility of NATO membership.
This is still the policy of NATO and Norway, presented lately on Wednesday by Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide on the main news. There, he maintained that it is not acceptable that Ukraine should be deprived of the right to future NATO membership – as if the decision on membership lies anywhere else than outside NATO headquarters on Boulevard Léopold III/Leopold III-laan in the Brussels district of Haren.
The pretense of Ukraine joining NATO, spearheaded by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, has in itself become a war-motivating factor for President Zelenskyj and his circle in Kyiv since the negotiations in Antalya and Istanbul (March 29, 22) were put in a body bag immediately after Brexitannian Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s surprise visit to Kyiv (April 9) where he gave Zelensky the following advice: – Putin is a war criminal, he should be put under pressure, not negotiated with.
The war policy has failed; it has no visible way forward except over bloody battlefields and through cities in complete ruins. The reactions in Paris, Brussels and Munich suggest that this insight is difficult to grasp even when Trump’s troops march into the premises with their realistic brutality because it originates from the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, although there is some uncertainty about how strong the support actually is in Congress on Capitol Hill.
Old neocons among the Republicans could get upset. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton told CNN that Trump’s phone call with Putin and the Trump gang’s first appearance in Europe “in practice means surrendering” to Putin even before any negotiations on Ukraine’s future.
The Red Party and Socialist Left Party and anti-imperialist war opponents can now freely promote suggestions that the NATO country Norway must demand that the US and NATO invite Russia to negotiations on a European security arrangement that halts NATO expansion, provides Ukraine with security guarantees, demands Russian military withdrawal and opens up for UN-guaranteed referendums in Crimea, under the auspices of the UN and within the framework of the OSCE.
The question of a European security arrangement must come first, during a ceasefire in Ukraine. In Munich, President Zelenskyj, almost in pure desperation, brought up ideas from the 90s about making
the Western Union (WEU), the old Brussels Pact, into the EU’s military pillar: armed forces and its own command structure as a supplement to NATO.
Translated by Johan Petter Andresen.